The Lockerbie bomber -- who was released from a Scottish prison last year because cancer had supposedly left him at death's door -- could be kept alive for up to five more years.

Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was said to have just months to live when Scottish authorities made the controversial decision to free him and allow him to return to Libya.

But the terrorist, given a life sentence for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which killed 270 people, has since been taking the chemotherapy drug Taxotere, the British paper The Sun reports today.

Other reports said that al-Megrahi had not been given the drug while he was in prison -- and might not have been allowed a "compassionate" discharge if it had been prescribed.... Al-Megrahi has prostate cancer, but his condition reportedly has stabilized.

So why wasn't al-Megrahi given Taxotere while in jail? Is it because the doctors, in their socialized wisdom, misdiagnosed his case and thought him "too far gone"? Did the Scottish "death panel" decide the cost was too high for an older man who would never see the light of day again anyway? Or was it deliberately withheld, in order to wrangle the "compassionate release" clause that al-Megrahi used wrangle his freedom?

Either way, politicized medicine is the root cause here. And al-Megrahi walks free, a killer celebrated as a hero, with years of good living left to him. Unlike these 270 folks, whose lives were cut short to serve al-Megrahi's bloody cause...

I can only imagine how their families feel. To have their loves one killed in the sky, and then to see their murderer set free by Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill, who felt more concern for al-Megrahi than for his victims, and their survivors...

Meanwhile, Robert Gibbs predictssocialized medicine will be the law of the land in the United States by the end of next week. But this type of incident could never happen here...right?